Nice quirk if you can get it
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday March 4, 2011
Strange performance works are celebrated as part of the Imperial Panda Festival. By Clara Iaccarino. The Imperial Panda Festival, now in its fourth year and comprising quirky theatre and performance-art lunacy, has established itself as one of Sydney's leading underground arts festivals.This year's festival hub is city club Goodgod and the wild array of shows, from variety nights to storytelling and autobiographical performance art, are taking over inner-city spaces from Redfern Town Hall to First Draft Depot in Surry Hills.Performance-art heroines Brown Council are presenting their four-hour endurance theatre work, A Comedy, at Bill and George in Redfern. The work premiered at Performance Space's Liveworks Festival and reveals the darker, more malicious side of comedy.Brown Council's Fran Barrett says the work was developed based on a Nietzsche quote: "to laugh means to be malicious but with a good conscience". The show involves the four Brown Councillors sporting dunce hats as they perform five different acts as dictated by the audience. There's the dancing monkey, cream pie throwing, a slapstick routine, a stand-up comedy routine and a magic trick. "As you push yourself, more and more people find it funnier," Barrett says. "Some people stay for the whole show and become part of the act."At the end of each hour in the show, the Brown Councillors blindfold themselves and are left at the mercy of the audience, who have been sitting among piles of tomatoes. After the first hour, Barrett says nobody moved. But by the final blindfolding, "people went wild". "They were throwing tomatoes everywhere and then some people were yelling for them to stop."She says the work offers truth to Nietzsche's words, as it sheds light on people's differing natures.Equally bizarre is Masterclass, a show presented by Gareth Davies of Melbourne's Black Lung Theatre and Charlie Garber from comedy trio Pig Island.Garber says the show began as an acting masterclass and became a work about "illusion and reality and the dangerous power of art and drama". "It's part warning," Garber continues. "It's saying, don't try pretending or acting or art at home. It's the personal story of what happened to us and why we need to be careful when harnessing the power of the imagination."We've tried to make something quite epic," he says.Davies's character is a man born into a production of Les Miserables, who, at 21, finds himself thrust from the chorus. "He then has to deal with having a character inside of him from revolutionary France," Garber says. "Hopefully it's going to be really funny."Festival highlightsA Stock ExchangeNo money changes hands; you can swap a memory for a joke or a painting for a haircut.And That Was the Summer that Changed My LifePost's Zoe Coombs Marr relives the humiliation of being a teenager.Man Up: A Night of Male ImpersonationsA late-night queer variety show of male impersonations featuring an array of Imperial Panda personalities.Some Film MuseumsI Have KnownImperial Panda co-director Eddie Sharp pilfers elements of horror and fantasy as he invites us into a decrepit tourist-trap museum overflowing with model trains and dioramas.StorytellingCampfire Collective presents the old-fashioned storytelling experience, complete with tales of cool-room sex, rehab and funerals on acid.IMPERIAL PANDA FESTIVALMarch 4-20, theimperialpanda.com, tickets at door. A Comedy, March 19, hourly 6pm-9pm, Bill and George, Level 1, 10-16 William Street, Redfern, $15. Masterclass, March 4-5, 11-12, Goodgod Danceteria, 55 Liverpool Street, $15.
© 2011 Sydney Morning Herald
